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An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has added a new type of story to its News Feed today: if more than one of your friends post about the same topic, and it has a Page on the social network, the posts will be grouped under a Posted About story, even if your friends don't explicitly tag the Page. It turns out Facebook is using natural language processing on status updates as well as the headlines of posted links to figure out if a topic mentioned has a corresponding Page, and then searches to see if your other friends have done so as well."

So, now that we can correlate what people are talking about to topics, can we get proper threading?
The code doesn't work in some overloaded cases such as categorizing the phrase "Big Apple" under "Apple, Inc.".

I've yet to see it work well. It grouped a tonne of posts together that had wikipedia links for no reason other than wikipedia, and in another it gouped a bunch of posts together about australian electronic musician Tomas Ford together, then decided it was about Ford Motorcars (which apparently has deeply annoyed the somewhat anticorporate musician right off)

That's going to be offered when FB merges with Microsoft later this year. Among the
benefits for users will be automatic red squiggly lines under 68.4% of their words, and a compulsory AI comic book character (licensed from Marvel) to offer timely wording suggestions, like "it's clobberin' time" and "my spider-sense is tingling!".

Just imagine it: when 30+% of your words are misspelled you hear "You're making me angry..", then at 50+% you hear very loudly "HULK SMASH!!11", and Hulk goes on a rige-induced violent rampage, destroying first your UI elements, then actual installed applications and games, then all of your files.. you'd better be a really fast learner and start fixing those misspellings or your PC wouldn't be useable for long!

It's beyond annoying- it will deter me from posting things I otherwise would, when the content is critical of the subject. Every time I tell my friends about the latest idiotic thing Sarah Palin [thefreedictionary.com] or Donald Trump [reference.com] say and why only an ignoramus could believe that, it'll link to their pages. I don't want those halfwits to get credited as being relevant just because I share a laugh with my friends, and I certainly don't want to be related to her even if only by hyperlink.

Facebook told Inside Facebook that its natural language processing doesn’t detect sentiment, how a Page’s name is being used, or whether the mentioned Page was actually the focus of the update. Page owners may not like Facebook linking to their Page if a post isn’t actually what a user was discussing or if it is being talked about negatively.

That makes it a keyword search. Natural Language Processing implies that it intelligently parses the text to locate the topic, this is Dumb Processing.

Except when dealing with synonyms. A page which uses only the word 'cars' to refer to cars will not be matched to a page that only uses the word 'automobiles' to refer to cars with keyword search. I'm not saying FB does this but synonymy is a well known problem (with solutions) in information retrieval.

When did facebook receive exclusive rights to that name? Just because a movie was made about it under that name does not mean there is no other social network on the planet...

You were referring to "the social network" but I can't quote the title of your message (well, not lazily, anyway).

Nobody said it was "THE" social network. The fragment "the social network" obviously refers back to the start of the sentence where Facebook is referenced as the subject. So, the fragment is saying that Facebook is a social network; which it is. Your whole post disregards context and makes an assumption based on disregarding that context. Are you a journalist?

Reason to not use Facebook. Where is the assumption that I want to be grouped in with some off the cuff remark made by friend 1871. Who is that guy and why is he on my Facebook anyway? I should do some defriending soon.

How am I the only person upset about the issue at hand here? I don't want my posts being associated with any person, topic, or page, unless I INTEND for that to happen.

Example: There are a lot of drug groups on Facebook and if I use my account to criticize drugs, what if the NLP accidently groups myself and my friends and tags our posts as "About Citizens for Legal Marijuana" or some such? The point isn't whether the AI makes mistakes, the point is, how does it know my posts ought to be About anything at